Musing Around
"An artist is painting their masterpiece: A group of young girls sitting together, posed, with no expression on their faces. At the blink of an eye, the girls in the painting magically come to life! The artist is confused and horrified, but most of all, upset because the girls are not acting gracefully, like the artist envisioned, instead, they're running around like monkeys; playing tag, jumping on their chairs, knocking down the vase of flowers painted so elegantly next to them. One second, the artist stood, fuming at the painting, and the next thing they knew, they were INSIDE the painting! Now the artist has a chance to capture their creations and order them to sit back down like the ladies they were meant to be, but the girls only mock the artist, and then steal the painter's palette and brush, so now, not only are they acting like children, they're acting like children with paint! They paint splashes of red, blue, and purple on their white, flowy dresses. At this point, the artist is too tired to catch them, so they just let the girls play with the paint. The colors actually didn't look too bad. That was when the artist realized that they were not meant to be elegant ladies, but human beings who longed to be creative."
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What you just read was something that I wrote down in my bullet journal on January 1, 2023, and 9 months later, it became the inspiration for a dance that I choreographed. With a few adjustments, I told this story, but the girls in white dresses became muses, so the story was now about a relationship between an artist and their muses.
Backstory: I have never choreographed anything. Most of my dance experience comes from doing musical theater, so I did not grow up doing ballet, tap, contemporary, or hip-hop, and the closest thing to jazz that I have is from dancing in musical theater, so the first challenge when getting to choreograph this dance was getting over my impostor syndrome, since I was surrounded by people who have been dancing their entire lives. The only real abilities that I had confidence in were my costume design skills, and my storytelling skills, so whenever I was stuck in a choreographic block, I focused on those two skills; especially storytelling.
When it comes to the audience's reaction, different dances can have different purposes. Some dances are focused on portraying an emotion, or an abstract concept, as with most modern, contemporary, or lyrical dances; or they are there to entertain, as with most jazz, and hip-hop styles. When I choreographed this dance, I wanted to tell a story that was clear to the audience, and I knew that I achieved that goal when my grandmother, who has always struggled with dyslexia, came up to me and said "your dance was my favorite because I understood what was going on."
While I didn't have much dance background, my dancers had a ton of dance experience in their back pockets, which was fun to play around with. During sections of the dance where the muses were dancing in their own style. For those sections, I met with my dancers individually, and I asked them to just play with the music and dance however they wanted. There were girls running all over the place doing leaps and turns, which I could not teach them how to do to save my life, but I still had confidence in their abilities to do it. I even had a dancer with less dance experience than me, but she was an equestrian vaulter with a gymnastics background, so I could use her in lifts, and tumbling.
To me, the thing that elevated the storytelling is that each individual dancer were not just ensemble dancers; I assigned each of them a muse that they were portraying. For example, Calliope is the muse of Epic Poetry, which I associate with strength, and the girl who with the gymnastics background was incredibly strong, so I assigned her the role of Calliope. To give another example, I gave two girls Thalia and Melpomene, who are the muses of Comedy and Tragedy, respectively, because I wanted to see them do duets together. While I knew that the audience would never figure out that the dancers are individual characters, I feel like it elevated the storytelling because it added more depth and layers to the characters.
In Greek mythology, the muses are sources of inspiration for the arts. It's ironic that in my dance, I was a painter interacting with the muses, because my dancers truly were sources of inspiration for me throughout this process! I'm so glad that I had this opportunity, and I'm incredibly proud of the work that I put in.